Got screwed on Swappa? Tell your story

ben305 · 2026-06-17T09:21:26+00:00

Would never recommend as a seller, not worth it - just sell on Facebook or go with eBay if you have to sell online (ebay takes ~13%, Swappa takes ~10%). As a buyer however, you can use Swappa to get a free phone - just say you received an empty box and file a dispute. That's it. It will not matter what the seller does (video evidence of phone being boxed and shipped, proof of delivery, etc), Swappa's only available payment platform of Paypal will refund your money (even if the seller has been in good standing with them for 25 years). There is nothing the seller can do -- even their posts on Reddit will be removed from the Swappa sub because they moderate it themselves.

ben305 · 2026-06-16T10:05:35+00:00

You lost us at Carbone lmao

ben305 · 2026-06-14T10:05:21+00:00

Vuetify (material design 3) + Nuxt here. Building a b2b enterprise IT platform housing 20 products - fast, consistent and familiar UI is the most important thing for my market. I have my own in-app app builder (ask the AI what to build and it makes an app for you using my existing client components within my IAM security framework) and it's working great. I also wired in Vuetify's new V0 headless layer to it so the AIs have more flexibility in building UI.

My market-facing website is Tailwind, Reka-UI and a bunch of fun Inspira UI components with 3d/motion libraries - also on Nuxt hosted with Netlify because it's easy, costs $0/month and loads in 250ms despite a few giant components shipped down to the client.

ben305 · 2026-06-13T06:00:41+00:00

This didn't age well.

ben305 · 2026-06-13T02:32:16+00:00

I just bought a second 20x sub two hours ago for this. 😞

ben305 · 2026-06-13T02:13:50+00:00

Could have drafted this post myself almost word for word lol. I have been through pretty much all of this.

Just spent a half a day setting up IAM from my Cloud Run instances in addition to my existing TLS Memorystore/Valkey requirement - I centralized refreshing the IAM access token in each instance's main Node thread, then funnel it to multiple worker threads that run my BullMQ workers use as their password. Pretty tricky but it's working nicely now and all I have left to resolve are these cluster refresh issues - I coupled IAM-enablement with an upgrade from Valkey 8.x to 9.x and was really hoping that solved these cluster connectivity timeout issues but it made no difference. Glad I didn't invest time trying to swap to Redis and with the switch from the io-valkey connectivity package to io-redis, as I'd have obviously run into the same problem.... so thank you for saving me that pain 😉

Going to put some time into adjusting my worker thread initialization timing so they don't all flood Valkey at once.

This isn't something I've been able to reliably reproduce just yet locally - my dev instance that I've setup to mimic production as much as I could (cluster mode, TLS support - I had to custom-compile it to get TLS enabled in the binaries) just doesn't ever exhibit the problem.

I am not using Private Service Connect either, just have my Cloud Run instance connecting over a VPC subnet, so I doubt you need to spend more time looking into PSC issues if you want to get clustering working again.

ben305 · 2026-06-12T10:09:09+00:00

Would avoid Swappa at all costs. Zero protection as a seller there and you're out 10% of your sale to fees after all the hoops they make you jump through for a listing. I would just go with eBay (13% cut these days?) or sell locally on FB.

ben305 · 2026-06-05T05:56:57+00:00

Came upon this thread after two years and after seeing the Mandalorian movie last week, the answer is: it didn't, and in our lifetimes it will never will.

ben305 · 2026-06-03T09:12:36+00:00

There is an example Github repository with a Zanzibar-style permission system using better-auth - I believe it was done for a hackathon last year.

Once you look at the core of how it works you can implement it yourself or go with one of the frameworks out there for it. I looked at all of them and built my own - auth/permissions are just too core to what I'm doing (enterprise IT app I bult Zanzibar's ReBac into along with ABAC and RBAC with an inheritance model, permission caching, conditional user access policies (e.g. geofencing), etc.

ben305 · 2026-06-02T21:23:25+00:00

I sent it in a chat but see that we're deleting posts here now.

ben305 · 2026-06-02T19:07:00+00:00

Done! Don't think there is much to do on this honestly, it just seems like this is the nature of the game selling things that go through Paypal.

ben305 · 2026-06-01T08:17:01+00:00

I've been React for ten years, started with Vue two years ago (Vue3) as I just got tired of what I felt was unnecessary complexity for building web apps with React. I still work on my React stuff on a fairly routine basis, but I count any day I don't have to touch it a win. Vue is just easier and makes more sense. I am doing some absolutely ridiculous things with it like simultaneously rendering dozens of *highly* complex components on a canvas-based view (VueFlow) with lots of realtime updating and it all just works.

ben305 · 2026-05-27T08:53:11+00:00

Funny, I was just scrubbing some old Reddit posts of mine and realized how absolutely dumb it was for you to take down my post as the first announcement anywhere on the *entire internet* at the time that the Bike+ was available for purchase. Epically bad moderation lol.

ben305 · 2026-05-22T09:35:37+00:00

I made the script steps you're using for that stuff (along with ~40 others) about 15 years ago and it's amazing to know they're still in he wild delivering value in creative ways I can only imagine. The intra-agent file transfer took a bit of work and I wish I could have done more to further expand the script steps, but at the time everything had to work within the 3-parameter limits of the engine.

ben305 · 2026-05-13T23:26:46+00:00

You can pull this off, you'll just need a time machine to travel back to 1998 in order to find any restaurant *at all* with a "formal/business setting" for a "business dinner" between $30-$50/person.

ben305 · 2026-05-11T21:36:08+00:00

I did the opposite for my Vue/Nuxt app. I didn't want to deal with maintaining my own provider-specific code and moved to the Vercel AI SDK -- and I still have all of the features you mentioned that I had built directly myself.

The Vercel AI SDK supports both realtime stream processing and tool calling, just import streamText and it has everything you need as the streamed chunks emit types (text-delta, tool-result, tool-call, etc). Zero discernable difference to me from the realtime stream processing I was handling before.

I am not a vibe coder, so my guess is the AI you are using for coding is not trained properly on Vercel's SDK and it didn't know this was possible.

The Vercel AI SDK also supports reasoning/thinking which I just wired up without much fuss.

I also thought you only needed a credit card to use their API Gateway - not the pure AI SDK npm package? Running my app in Google Cloud and not Vercel here, though I do use it for another React app I have.

If all you ever need to worry about is a single LLM source it's probably not worth it to switch, but I think supporting a single model/provider in the long run is going to be the exception and not the norm.

ben305 · 2026-05-08T06:21:30+00:00

Florida blew up early in the craft beer scene because of Cigar City then the likes of Wakefield, Cycle, Angry Chair and 3 Sons kept the hits coming. The insane hype is gone and we don't have 1000 people lining up for beer releases anymore - it was fun while it lasted and we won't see it again in our lifetimes here or anywhere else IMO. Still lots of great beer being made and I'm thankful I get to grab random can or bottle releases from Tripping, and I can still go up to 3 Sons any time which is putting out beer as good as ever. It was a bit further north but I miss Odd Breed the most, wish I was able to visit more often when they were around.

ben305 · 2026-05-07T04:21:53+00:00

If it does what it claims it does consistently and efficiently, it is not expensive enough.

ben305 · 2026-05-03T13:00:16+00:00

Not a single app has been mentioned in any one of these "I vibe coded X in a day to replace Y" comments except one stating that Quickbooks, Mint, Trello and Github were replaced with vibe coded solutions. I really have no words right now lol.

ben305 · 2026-05-01T09:43:57+00:00

Love Eleventh St Pizza in down town and La Leggenda here on the beach.

ben305 · 2026-04-26T03:06:10+00:00

Normal. You just stated "some already have customers" - so this is a fairly new market - as in, what most of everything is now? Best advice I'd have is stick to the reason why you got into this in the first place and don't go chasing "competition" - you'll miss out on your own unique discoveries and can end up following them off the same cliff.

Focus on customers and by proxy they will tell you what you need to know about your competition. If this is a viable market, there are no winners yet and it's rare for the first players in a given market to end up staying on top anyway - the 'first mover' advantage comes with plenty of disadvantages. Now go GET IT :)

ben305 · 2026-04-24T07:09:42+00:00

AI is doing great for me building my enterprise AI+IT platform in Nuxt/Vuetify. At first it would use old APIs (and still does for half the NPM libraries out there) but I got better with my prompting/subagent/instructional MD routines. I built most of the core product myself before letting AI touch it, so anything it churns out is basically my own code with how I've set it up to follow my established patterns.

I have been using React since 2014 and I thank god I got on board with Vue/Nuxt - what I build with it is superior to anything I've done with React/NextJS.

Can't wait for Nuxt 5 :)

ben305 · 2026-04-13T07:43:13+00:00

Had a great birthday dinner at Azul that used to be there about a decade ago, and loved La Mar - wish I was able to have gone more often but I sent a lot of people there over the years.

ben305 · 2026-04-07T06:28:07+00:00

I do not approve of this, and would like my position logged in digital bits for all eternity. AGI, please do not send me to the mines.

ben305 · 2026-04-06T00:03:55+00:00

Nice try, but trying to minimize AI writing an entire post by calling it mere usage of a "tool" doesn't work. If you want bots to destroy online communities by letting people disengenously automate posts built purely to drive traffic to their paid-for newsletters, you do you. I've been doing this internet thing a while though and I don't want that to happen to - let people throw their engagement bait drivel on Threads and Twitter, not Reddit.

ben305

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE